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The Myth of Progress: 2001: a Space Odyssey Robert Poole Limiting Outer Space Ed. Alexander CT Geppert

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The Myth of Progress: 2001: a Space Odyssey Robert Poole Limiting Outer Space Ed. Alexander CT Geppert The Myth of Progress: 2001: A Space Odyssey Robert Poole Limiting Outer Space ed. Alexander C. T. Geppert (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming, 2018). Corrected pre-print. The 1968 film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey marked the cultural apex of the Space Age.1 It was an Anglo-American project, the joint creation of the leading film director Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999), famous for the nuclear war satire Dr Strangelove, and the leading science fiction and popular science writer Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008), famous for his 1945 prediction of the communications satellite.2 (Figure 1: Arthur C. Clarke). 2001 was the first science fiction film to have genuinely plausible special effects. Its making was a miniature space program in its own right, breaking all previous records for production costs and generating considerable public interest; it was, in relation to the science of its day, the most scientifically accurate feature film ever made.3 It was made in the mid-1960s at a time when space programs were accelerating on all fronts. The early human- cannonball style flights of the Mercury and Vostok programs were over and the more complex Gemini and Voshkod missions saw the first astronauts performing 1 The principal printed sources are: Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey, London: Hutchinson, 1968; Jerome Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, New York: Signet, 1970; Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972; Piers Bizony, 2001: Filming the Future, London: Aurum Press, 1994; David G. Stork, ed., Hal’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997; Alison Castle, The Stanley Kubrick Archive, London: Taschen, 2005; Anthony Frewin, Are We Alone? The Stanley Kubrick Extraterrestrial Intelligence Interviews, London: Elliott and Thompson, 2005; Robert Volker, ed., Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; Peter Kramer, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 2 John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, London: Harper Collins, 1997; Arthur C. Clarke, Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! London: Harper Collins, 1999; Neil McAleer, Odyssey: The Authorized Biography of Arthur C. Clarke, London: Victor Gollancz, 1992; Arthur C. Clarke, 'Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?', Wireless World 51.10 (October 1945), 305-8. 3 David Kirby, Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011, 1-8. orbital maneuvers, walking in space, and sending back stunning pictures of the blue planet below. The first space probes had recently reached Venus and Mars, their senders still optimistic about detecting signs of life. 2001 opened across the United States in the spring of 1968, and across the rest of the world in the spring and summer, during a lull in the US manned space program caused by the Apollo fire disaster of January 1967. 2001 was for a time the biggest show in space; it attracted record audiences, and was still running in many cities more than year later as the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the Moon.4 Arthur Clarke was then on the television commentary team for CBS, a prophet in his own future, his words broadcast round the world on the communications satellites whose advent he had predicted in 1945. Never have fiction and reality run so close; there is a case for saying that the real winner of the Space Race was 2001: A Space Odyssey.5 At its inception in 1964, 2001 had promised to be a kind of propagandist docu-drama on the model of Destination Moon (1950) and The Conquest of Space (1955), designed with the best available scientific advice to make the case for space travel in a popular form.6 It was at first trailed as Journey Beyond the Stars, an exciting saga of the exploration of the solar system, and it was the prospect of realistic scenes of space travel, as depicted on posters by the NASA artist Robert McCall (1919–2010), that initially brought audiences flooding in. (Figure 2: poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey) Keen to stay ahead of present-day reality however, Kubrick and Clarke had raised their sights further into the future – to the moment of first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, which at that time was widely anticipated (particularly in Europe) as a consequence of space travel. They explained that their aim was to prepare the public for the impact of such an encounter, which threatened shock but promised enlightenment. Kubrick went as far as filming dozens of interviews with leading scientists and philosophers on the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence for a documentary prologue, although the 4 Kramer, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 90−2. 5 Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. 6 Ibid., 45-8, 67-8, 193-5. 2 plan was in the end scrapped, leaving a legacy of interviews of considerable historical interest.7 Also scrapped, to the dismay of the serious space community, were almost all the traditional explanations about the technology of space travel. The 1940s and 1950s had been the heyday of ‘hard’ science fiction and the gadget story, and the much-publicized attention to technological detail in the production of 2001 had led the public to expect something similar, but there were to be no ‘now tell me, professor’ moments in Kubrick’s film.8 Even the narrative voiceovers, regarded as essential by Kubrick’s advisors in order to explain the obscure plot, were abandoned. ‘This isn’t a proper science fiction movie at all’ thought one leading science fiction writer, Lester del Rey. ‘A wasted opportunity’ complained another, Frederick Pohl. Kubrick described such reactions as ‘obtuse.’9 His aim, concealed from his eager technical staff, was to achieve a future environment plausible enough to allow the viewers to take it for granted and concentrate on the real story. An early section depicting lunar exploration in the near future came closest to satisfying expectations, with its glorious space ballet to the soundtrack of Johann Strauss' Blue danube waltz and its realistically-styled account of the discovery of an alien artifact on the Moon. The subsequent long voyage to Jupiter (in the novel, Saturn) to investigate the apparent source of the alien artifact also contained plenty of conventional space interest, although the plot’s central conflict was not between humans and aliens but between the astronauts and their rogue computer. The recognizably science fiction elements of the film were framed by a 20- minute wordless prologue entitled ‘The dawn of Man’, set at the dawn of human evolution in Africa, and by a mysterious, psychedelic final sequence which came to be known as ‘the ultimate trip’. The film ended with the image of a human fetus floating in space above the Earth, gazing down on the entire globe as the eyes of humanity, in the persons of the Apollo 8 astronauts, would do so for the first time 7 The interviews are collected in Frewin, Are We Alone?, and the originals are in the Kubrick Archive, University of the Arts, London. 8 Brian Aldiss, Billion-Year-Spree [1973], London: Corgi, chs 9-10, 244-325. 9 Lester del Rey, Galaxy 26.6 (July 1968), 193-4, and Galaxy’s editor Frederick Pohl in Film Society Review 5.2 (1970), 23-7. Critical responses are collected in Agel, Making of 2001, and Stephanie Schwam, The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, New York: Random House, 2000; several hostile critics afterwards changed their minds. 3 in december 1968. The film as a whole was slow, hypnotic and enigmatic. In interviews Kubrick encouraged philosophical speculations about its meaning, while all the time insisting that he did not give explanations. This was Kubrick’s explanation, ‘on the lowest level’, of the final stages of the film: When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this [alien] artifact sweeps him into a field of force or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he’s placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to Earth prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny.10 In the long run, it was its mystical aspect which accounted for the cult status of 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001 offered a vision of progress on the grandest scale, in which space travel is a natural extension of the earliest human technology, and contact with extra- terrestrial intelligence triggers a step change in human evolution. On closer examination, however, there is however a darker side to both film and novel: the hints that preparations for nuclear war are more advanced than those for first contact; the emotionless and deceitful human characters; the equally emotionless and deceitful supercomputer HAL 9000 who derails the mission to Jupiter; and the dark fable of the origin of humanity through weaponry and violence in the ‘dawn of Man’ sequence. If 2001 is about transcendence, it is equally about the limits that have to be transcended. Sandwiched between the atomic black comedy Dr Strangelove (1964) and the dystopian A Clockwork Orange (1972), a film that was simply a peon to progress would have been an anomaly in the career of a director whose oeuvre was dominated by films exploring the human capacity for violence and deception. Much of the interest of 2001 for the historian lies in the contrast between its secular and progressive outward message and its more philosophical 10 Stanley Kubrick, 1970 interview with Joseph Gelmis, in Gene D.
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